Old Arthur Clarke Was Seldom Wrong
by wneleh
Summary: To Nicholas Rush, all this seems very familiar.


Disclaimer: I have no claim whatsoever many of these characters. All block quotes are from _Rendezvous with Rama_ by Arthur C. Clarke.

Old Arthur Clarke was Seldom wrong

by Helen W.

_What a cosmic irony, said Norton as he looked at his final figures, if after a million years of safe guidance Rama's computers had made one trifling error - perhaps changing the sign of an equation from plus to minus._

__

Everyone had been so certain that Rama would lose speed, so that it could be captured by the sun's gravity and thus become a new planet of the solar system. It was doing just the opposite.

It was gaining speed - and in the worst possible direction.

_Rama was falling ever more swiftly into the sun._

- _Rendezvous with Rama_, by Arthur C. Clarke

And as _Destiny_ rounds the gas giant and aims toward the star, Nicholas Rush thinks, yes, ironic.

_

* * *

_

_As the details of its new orbit became more and more clearly defined, it was hard to see how Rama could possibly escape disaster. Only a handful of comets had ever passed as close to the sun; at perihelion, it would be less than half a million kilometres above that inferno of fusing hydrogen. No solid material could withstand the temperature of such an approach; the tough alloy that comprised Rama's hull would start to melt at ten times that distance._

Nicholas doesn't know the composition of _Destiny's_ hull. But he is sure _Atlantis_ herself couldn't take a fraction of the forces that Clarke had had his heroes predict _Rama_ could tolerate.

And _Destiny_ will face much, much worse.

_

* * *

_

_Then, five million kilometres from the sun, and still accelerating, Rama started to spin its cocoon. Until now, it had been visible under the maximum power of Endeavour's telescopes as a tiny bright bar; suddenly it began to scintillate, like a star seen through horizon mists. It almost seemed as if it was disintegrating; When he saw the image breaking up, Norton felt a poignant sense of grief at the loss of so much wonder. Then he realized that Rama was still there, but that it was surrounded by a shimmering haze._

_And then it was gone. In its place was a brilliant, star-like object, showing no visible disc - as if Rama had suddenly contracted into a tiny ball._

It is notoriously difficult to grasp what a craft looks like when you're aboard it, whether it's a dingy, an aircraft carrier, or an alien spaceship.

Nicholas has caught glimpses of the exterior of _Destiny_, and has explored what he could; and of course they'd had access to schematics of a sort for a time. But at best he's felt like the mythical blind man trying to fathom an elephant by touch.

It's only when Eli hands him the device showing the kino's view of _Destiny_ that Nicholas realizes that he has been holding out hope that it would somehow reveal the many-kilometers-long cylinder of _Rama_.

_Destiny_ is heartbreakingly beautiful, but has no defenses against the oncoming star.

* * *

_It was some time before they realized what had happened. Rama had indeed disappeared: it was now surrounded by a perfectly reflecting sphere, about a hundred kilometres in diameter. All that they could now see was the reflection of the sun itself, on the curved portion that was closest to them. Behind this protective bubble, Rama was presumably safe from the solar inferno._

So Nicholas returns to the little cabin he'd claimed, picks up his horrid book - unfortunately, he'd brought nothing by any of science fiction's grand masters - and tries to lose himself for a while.

And then - he doesn't die.

* * *

_For it was still gaining speed; now it was moving at more than two thousand kilometres a second, and there was no question of it ever remaining a captive of the sun. Now, at last, the Raman strategy was obvious; they had come so close to the sun merely to tap its energy at the source, and to speed themselves even faster on the way to their ultimate unknown goal..._

_And presently it seemed that they were tapping more than energy. No one could ever be certain of this, because the nearest observing instruments were thirty million kilometres away, but there were definite indications that matter was flowing from the sun into Rama itself, as if it was replacing the leakages and losses of ten thousand centuries in space._

Rush has even less understanding of _Destiny's_ actions than Commander Norton had had of _Rama's_. It really doesn't matter, though; they have time now, more time to study solar harvesting - to study everything about_Destiny_ - than Norton's crew had ever had, oh yes.

_

* * *

_

_It was dropping out of the Ecliptic, down into the southern sky, far below the plane in which all the planets move. Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way._

And now Colonel Young has accused him of knowing about the solar drives all along. There are so many ways of responding to this; but none would convince anyone so willing to entertain such a notion.

'It seems old Arthur Clark was seldom wrong,' he imagines saying, but, no. "Cheers, everyone," he says instead, and leaves.

* * * THE END * * *

All feedback is, as usual, appreciated, here or to helenw at murphnet dot org.


End file.
